In May and June 1620 the governors of provinces were openly showing their discontent. The Duc de Vendôme could dispose of Brittany, the Duc de Longueville of Normandy, the Duc de Mayenne of Guyenne; and these three, with many others, left the Court and retired to their governments, where they began to prepare for civil war. The Duc de Rohan, in the name of the Protestant party, went so far as to advise the Queen-mother to leave Angers for Bordeaux and to assemble an army in the South. One of the chief malcontents, the Comtesse de Soissons, furious at the release of her cousin and enemy, the Prince de Condé, left Paris with her young son and came to Angers. As the summer advanced, the Queen having decided to hold her own in the west, many of _les grands_ followed Madame la Comtesse, and Marie was surrounded by a crowd of restless, warlike nobles and princes, who were held back with difficulty from declaring open and instant war upon the King. Half France, apparently, was on her side--princes, populations, Catholics, Huguenots, and men of law: at one moment a successful campaign against the King and Luynes seemed a certainty, and Angers was the centre of enthusiastic military preparations. But Richelieu was there--a power behind all the discontented swaggerers of Her Majesty’s Court. A small, strong party, including the Queen herself, believed in him. He had taken care that his friends should hold the places nearest to her: Claude Bouthillier, brother of his faithful Sébastien, was at this time her secretary. The clergy, who always influenced Marie de Médicis, were with him to a man. He did not intend that the misunderstandings between the Queen-mother and the King, hardly mended by the passing reconciliation at Couzières, should come to actual war. It was he who prevented the move to the South; he who, through all these months at Angers, carried on negotiations with Luynes. Now, as always, he resented the domination of the princes and nobles, remaining convinced that the King must, in the last resort, be the chief authority in the kingdom. He deeply distrusted Luynes, and not altogether for personal reasons of disappointed ambition. In a sense he stood between the two parties; he did not cease to be something of a mediator; his advice to Marie de Médicis was never that of a political firebrand. Still, surrounded by firebrands--Vendôme and his like--it was difficult for the wisest counsels to prevail, and Richelieu seems to have accepted the inevitable, hoping that the warlike show made by the Queen’s friends might so far impress the King as to incline him to listen to the serious complaints poured into his ears by her and by them. The effect was not precisely this, but Richelieu was in one way content: it was not the Queen-mother who declared war. Louis XIII. himself, egged on, not by Luynes, who doubted and hesitated, but by the Prince de Condé, decided suddenly to march into Normandy and to crush his enemies by armed force.